Simms went on. “Got to where Ellen couldn’t touch her husband either, and that poor bastard, T. William Leigh, his name was—still is, for all I know—took it as long as he could, then lit out, and Ellen took to her rooms, as they say in novels.”
Latovsky looked out beyond the trees and softly blowing petals at the mammoth house, wondering which of the hundreds of windows had been Ellen Leigh’s.
“And that left Franny and me to raise the kid,” Simms said.
“You?”
“Me. See, Franny and I have an understanding.” He saw the look on Latovsky’s face and laughed heartily. “That’s right, Lieutenant, that’s what I mean, and stop looking like I just showed you my dick. Franny’s not the first rich girl to get it on with the butler... except I was houseman in those days. But with us it lasted. We took one look at each other when the old man hired me thirty-five years ago, fresh from the war in Korea, and that was it for both of us. Franny’s not the snob she looks like. She’s not a snob at all and the fact is she’d’ve married me then... or now, I guess. But then she’d have one more last name and I’d be the stud from town who married a Tilden. Didn’t set well with me at twenty-three, doesn’t set any better at fifty-seven, and this way’s been okay. Good, in fact—in fact, it’s been wonderful. We’ve got Eve and each other, there’ll be the baby...”
“Baby!”
“Guess Evie didn’t mention it—not even to Sam probably. She says she’s not sure and she just doesn’t seem to want to find out, but Mrs. Knapp says you can tell from the rings under her eyes, and Laura, the upstairs maid, says you can set your watch for seven a.m. by the sound of retching from Evie’s bathroom. And that brings me back, in a roundabout way and with a lot more talk than necessary, to reason two: Polly Bogen, who was upstairs maid before Laura. To Polly’s son, Tom, to be exact.”
“What about him.”
“He was about sixteen back when I’m talking about: tall, handsome, bright, and the only child. The fuel that made his folks’ motor go, as you can imagine. Well, one day, Ellen ‘saw’ him. Don’t know how, since she avoided touching folks about the way you’d avoid kissing a cobra. But somehow she touched Polly or something Polly touched, and their boy appeared to her. Not as the tall, straight, handsome youth he was, but as a husked-out shell curled up like a shrimp in a hospital bed and hooked up to all the devices. His hands were claws, the way they get after years in a coma, and she knew he’d been that way a long time and would stay that way. Most of all she knew how he got that way, and she told Polly.
“I’m sure it tore itself out of her, because for Ellen seeing and saying what she’d seen were like a weekend in the ninth circle of hell. But the boy’s life was at stake.”
“What’d she tell her?”
“That’s there’d be a storm Halloween night, two days from when I’m talking about. It’d be one of those fall squalls that blow down wet leaves and stick them to the road, and Tom Junior would be in a car with his buddies. They’d be drunk, the leaves would be slippery... you get the drift.”
Latovsky nodded.
“Anyway, Ellen told Polly and Polly told us servants. She tried not to believe it, tried to laugh at it, but wound up crying because she knew what Ellen could do, we all did. And finally, Polly told her husband, Tom Bogen, Senior.
“Don’t know to this day how Tom felt about second sight in general or the Dodd-Tilden ‘gift’ in particular, but I guess he figured he’d rather be a superstitious asshole than risk his son. Polly also told the folks of the other kids who were supposed to go out with Tom Junior that night. But they called it unGodly nonsense, said the Tilden women were a bunch of neurotic rich bitches looking for attention or words to that effect.
“The night came. Tom Senior and Polly knew better than to try talking a sixteen-year-old out of a prowl he’d been looking forward to for weeks, so they waited until he was upstairs getting rigged for the night’s parties. Probably in torn jeans and a black plastic jacket with an ad on the back for a pizza parlor in Detroit—just like kids nowadays—and they locked him in.
“Polly said it was horrible. It was an attic room, he couldn’t get out the window without breaking his neck, and had the sense not to try, even at sixteen, but he pounded on the door until his knuckles split and screamed names at them Polly said she’d never even heard before.
“The other boys came by to pick him up and Tom Senior went down and told them Tom Junior was under the weather and couldn’t go with them. But they must’ve heard the real story from their folks and they hung around, yelling and hooting, honking the horn and taunting the poor kid until he started throwing himself bodily against the door, and Polly said she was terrified he’d break the lock or some bones. But it was an old house, the door held firm, and all he broke was his collarbone, but even that didn’t slow him up.
“And all the time, it was a clear and mild night, Lieutenant. A perfect Halloween Eve with a hunter’s moon and not a cloud in the sky. It started about ten, with a little wind and a few drops of rain on the roof, and Polly said she wept with relief when she heard it. The wind picked up, the rain turned to a squall that flooded basements, blew the power out all over town... and blew down the last of the leaves and stuck them to the pavement.
“The other kids went to the parties. They drank and smoked weed, then took to the road. The kid driving, secure in that sense of immortality only the young have, put the pedal to the mat, missed a curve at seventy, and plowed into another car full of hooched-up kids on grass also doing seventy. Five were killed outright, one was crippled for life, one came out the squash Tom Bogen Junior would have been, and one walked away with a few cuts. Luck of the toss, luck of the toss, Lieutenant.”
“And Tom Bogen Junior?”
“Got a wife and a couple of kids, a degree from UConn, and an investment firm for the writers and movie actors in the Berkshires. But he’d’ve been the squash if Ellen hadn’t told Polly and Polly hadn’t listened. If Ellen saw it, it would happen if nothing had changed. If Eve saw it, it will happen if nothing changes. In this case, you, Dave.
“I know you probably see yourself as a nice, average guy except for carrying a gun; probably have a wife and a couple of kids and a raised ranch. Bet you play poker once a month, bowl, fish, root for the Mets—whatever. But in this instant you are nemesis, and if you don’t go now, and stay gone, he will find her. Then whaddaya suppose this killer of six will do to a psychic who might see his face in a vision?”
“Kill her.”
“That’s what I figure, too,” Simms said.
The kid in the gas station had clean, shining blond hair, pink cheeks, clear swimming-pool-blue eyes, and a Yale T-shirt. He filled Riley’s tank, took the money, then told him there was only one bar in Bridgeton, a roadhouse called Burt’s. He gave him clear directions and refused to take the buck tip Riley offered. He even waved when Riley pulled out. The rich are different, Riley thought, thinking of the rude and crude, dirty, pizza-faced kids who pumped gas upstate. Rednecks in training.
He followed the directions and found himself on the main street of a one-stoplight town that looked like a Christmas card without the snow. The street was lined with shops showing the golf and tennis clothes he saw in Town & Country in his dentist’s office. And cars, the collective cost of which would top the gross national product of a few countries.
The street ended at a magnificent eighteenth-century steepled New England church. He turned left as the kid told him to, and five minutes later came to Burt’s, which was a converted Colonial. He pulled into the lot and parked between a Rolls Comiche and a 7351 BMW and across from two horse vans and a Mercedes station wagon. Ah, America, he thought. Show the leader of any third-world country this parking lot, then drive him down the main street of Bridgeton, Connecticut, and he’d go home with a leaden lump of hate and envy in his heart.